It had been raining this summer. It’s near the end of April and there’s still rain that drizzles down from the blue heaven. It’s an unusual season that way. A friend and me was once examining how the weather was ironic, t’is summer yet there’s rain.

But today, the rain fell at dawn and the sun is starting to shine it’s light. It’s a beautiful light. Not so bright and yet not so dim like a rainy weather does have.

It’s the favoritest season don’t you think. I adore summer just like everyone does, just like you and me. It’s the time for letting flight the colorful kites so mighty in the oceanic blue sky. It’s the time for the kids to run in the arid grounds, dust and smoke in their faces, filling the air with innocent laughter and mirth.

I had dreams of summer before. I dream of summer as the windiest and most adorable golden field of wheat and corn, just like an American summer, along the intertstate highways and along old barns and stucco rural houses that serenade the bright summer like colorful marbles from afar.

I dreamt of summer just like the one I had mostly when I was a child. Cool air and incandescent shine all over me, as I flew my kite by myself or fish for small fishes in a nearby pond, like I own the weather for all myself, and myself alone.

Summer brings freedom. Unlike cold winter and heavy rainy days when one could merely sit by the window and see the wet grounds outside, puddles of mud all round, and wondered if a big fish would suddenly burst out in floods that sometimes come when the rain does not stop for days and days to come. I sometimes wished that the mythical fish, gigantic and full of mean scales on its bodice, would somehow appear and bring excitement to those sad rainy days when I was so young and so innocent. Of course, there’s no such fish as we all realized about the myths in our young unknowing minds as we grow up.

But it was so alive in my young mind, and it looks just like a coelacanth, that scaly big fish that was thought to be extinct but had been found out to still exist in some parts of Africa. And it’s huge like a submarine and I could imagine rivets all over its body, forming it and holding the whole body tight, like a gigantic machine fish, with a mean looking face that doesn’t smile at all.

I had the deepest fear of being gobbled whole and live by that giant scaly fish and finding myself just around its tonsil, calling for it to Please let me out now, you stupid fish! You have no right to put me inside your f*cking stomach and would you please belch me out right at this moment?!!! ( Pardon for the expletives.)

Oh, I really wouldn’t want to be trapped inside that dark crevice of a giant scaly fish and that’s one of my greatest fear. Maybe I could call that giantfishphobia, if there’s such a thing. Fortunately, there’s really no such big and scaly fish in reality, that would just suddenly burst out of a developing flood just outside the yard. Now, that I am grown up, such myths of my youth is for certain, just that, myth.

For the meantime, I am just going to savor the cool summer sunlight that’s enveloping the whole surrounding at this time and wish the heavy rainy days of May wouldn’t come just as yet.

(This is the content of a reaction paper I submitted today for my subject in graduate school, PA 201 - Theory & Practice of Public Administration)

I do not mean re-engineering or even re-structuring. Maybe all we need is merely to invigorate the government system in order for it to achieve the maximum efficiency that is expected of it.

We have tried such modes of re-invention as re-engineering and re-structuring, at great cost in time and money, and yet improvements have not been substantial or palpable. The public continues to languish in long queues every time a license or a passport is needed. Bribes are ever pernicious, and even more open today, like it is not anymore a secret that should be tucked inside the pocket or a key thrown into the deepest ocean.

The public continues to encounter ugly faces of public servants seemingly tired of their day job and daydreaming of life in beaches almost all day long. At the slightest error, the public who is merely seeking public service get squirmed at by those who are especially employed by the government in order to serve the public, and in order that the common person have the convenience that the government owes them.

What is the aim of the public sector now? This is one vital question that should be addressed before everything can be settled. Is the public servant merely holding position just in order to make a living? He or she should rather be selling vegetables or meat in the market, at least thereat, there would be wider potentiality for the improvement of wealth. Nobody could really get rich in the government service, even serving for a long time.

Is the public servant merely holding position for social status and pride? He or she would rather be joining pageants and spectacles on television, for he or she would be known better there.

The public office is a public trust. This dogma had even been institutionalized in our most fundamental set of laws – our Constitution – and this is most encompassing of all, where no one should be allowed to forget the essence of public service, which is in order to serve the people, and not merely for self aggrandizement.

In view of the foregoing issues, therefore it is but time to realigned our views about the public sector, starting from the people within it. That for every employee of the government, whether national or local, every time he or she sees an individual, riding a Mercedes Benz or wearing no shoes and in tattered clothes, it should not matter, because that person, whether rich or poor, famous or unknown, is the very public sector he or she is aimed to serve.

In this manner, improvement of government service and the government system could be initiated, entering its nascent stages.

Despite the improvements in work environment, like air-conditioned areas, new buildings, expensive vehicles and increase in pay and bonuses, government service remains the same old horse, who is lackluster in movement, lacks dynamism and most of all, deficient towards its main aim of serving the public dutifully and with vigor. The government remains a system that is prone to stagnation and inefficiency, misappropriation, abuse of authority and lack of direction.

We have tried re-engineering the government system in the past and yet even the best re-engineers couldn’t tame the wild river that is the Philippine government system. Maybe we need a rocket scientist for this. We have tried re-structuring but even if our re-structurers could build a pyramid or an Eiffel Tower out of a molehill, the government system remains an ancient nipa hut.

Maybe it’s time that we should try re-invigorization.

It’s not as complicated to do as re-structuring does or as expensive as a re-engineering would demand. It only takes will, political will and cooperation from the people in the system. There are a number of factors that would be put in focus in this aim of putting the government service in the right track, one is leadership, two is awareness, three is competition, four incentive, and five public choice.

In LEADERSHIP, I mean to say political leadership. When we all almost agree that politics and the bureaucracy could not really be separated and is intertwined almost all the time, leadership becomes a most important factor in putting vigor and integrity back into the government service. In choosing our political leaders, especially in the next election activities in the coming years, the people should now aim for leaders who have proven capacity to lead and carry an entire workforce towards the improvement of service. It starts with the people then. If the electorate fails in the first place to change our leadership from the highest level, towards the root level, then re-invigorization of the government system would remain an illusion.

AWARENESS is two-pronged, first there should be awareness or a high level of consciousness among our public servants that their holding of their respective positions is not meant for self-aggrandizement alone, as a form of livelihood above all, but in order to serve the public well, and this should become a passionate and patriotic mission in every individual that would be integrated into the government service. Secondly, there should be similar level of awareness as to the PUBLIC being the CLIENT that the government is aimed to served, (the private sector prefer to call them CUSTOMERS) and the government system is aimed at primarily serving the needs of the CLIENT, that when the client is dissatisfied, public service becomes irrelevant and inefficient in every sensible sense possible. The CLIENT becomes the reason for existence, without it, there is no public service in the first place. This way, every client that enters the halls of a government office should be served well, for the moment that no one would anymore enter the halls of government offices, is just about the time that public service should eradicated.

COMPETITION could be injected into the public sector so that improvement of service could pertain. If the public could be given a choice as to the locus of a better service that they are necessitating, then every public servant would aim to proffer the better form or kind of service. This would entail privatization or semi-privatization of some government agencies or giving the public more stake in the government system, where there is increased community involvement in public service. Competition would entail the heightened accountability and responsibility factor, where the government service would become directly accountable towards the community, that there is really not one that is indispensable, that the public would always have a better place to go when someone in the public sector doesn’t want to serve the people anymore, but only wants to receive salaries and bonuses. This is where PUBLIC CHOICE comes. This element of re-invigorization is the most complicated of all, but it could be done through medium term action plan, like say five years in the process, incrementally achieved by phases. And of course, this would entail a more detailed document and methodology. Competition also would bring forth to the adjustment of tenures in public service where at present, there is that seemingly extreme bias in favor of security of tenure, so extreme that even if a public servant would go to his or her work in drag and sleep all day, the government system could not take him or her away, resulting to mass demoralization and low-level performances. Public service should straightened out its merit system that only a good performance could lead to promotions and increase in compensation, that not one indispensable that for whenever a public servant does not want to serve the public anymore, as expected of him or her, then other more competent or more able individuals from the workforce should be recruited in his or her stead.

INCENTIVES of course remains a very important element, just like in re-structuring or re-engineering, that for every PUBLIC CHOICE of a government service, the better service would gain performance incentives, such as quota bonuses for a certain level unit of work, like for example if this government cashier had served 100 clients in a day, then performance credits and bonuses would inure or if this inspector had visited more areas or locations in a month than all the rest, he or she receives a hefty amount. It could be done in a larger scale that for example if this government agency branch had performed well in a particular year, more than the others in the same field, the whole workforce of that branch would get bonuses and be lauded with public acclaim. They do that in private sector, that’s why the private sector had been able to build the grand Makati skyline over the years, and is establishing another in Fort Bonifacio and in Ortigas, aside from the busting urban scene in Cebu and Davao, and they do not receive any subsidy from taxpayers, unlike the government service system.

The private sector had not been fraught with issues of grand corruption because employees in the private sector do not attain such level of indispensability like that in the public service, where those who performed well are credited well and remain in the service for long, while those who are lackluster and lack integrity in work is taken out of the system. And besides, if one reaches a managerial or administrative level in the private sector, one is assured of hefty compensation that is why, in recent years, managers and executives of private companies have been able to increased sales in dramatic proportions. There are a lot of things that the government service could learn from the private sector in terms of methodologies, form of work structure, incentive system, recruitment and promotion system, tenures of employees, work ethics and level of competency and most of all in their treatment of the CLIENT, which they often call as the CUSTOMER.

In public service, the CLIENT may not always be right, but for certain they are the reason for being. A population that is served better by the government, in terms of public service — like education, licenses, security of food, public order and safety, health and welfare, livelihood opportunities, housing, job placements, communication and technology, etc.— is a population that can make a better government and thereon, a more vibrant State.

Note: I hope Professor Rico R. Mabalod would give me a good grade for this.

THIS IS SUMMER AND WE AREN’T IN NOVEMBER.. There shouldn’t be Halloween stories.

But a couple of nights ago, I was early for my public administration class that when I entered the room, there was only one classmate waiting for the teacher before I came in. I said “Hi” and Rhea said “Why don’t you hi yourself”, no, I mean she also said hello to me, and was in fact similarly polite to me, like I was to her when I knocked on the door and greeted her earlier.

You know, I always have this untoward trepidation about snobby and conceited women when I was younger, perhaps even until now, that I have this subliminal fear of greeting women I am not so familiar with, like women of newfound acquaintances and those that are unfamiliar colleagues at work, that I often dissuade myself from greeting women who aren’t really close to me. In fact, I often have daytime nightmares about this that I imagine how conceited women would always respond to me when I said to them “Hello, how do you do?” and they would be like “Why are you helloing me or hi-ing me like that. Why don’t you hello yourself and hi yourself?”

But enough about that trepidation, I am sure it is merely that, trepidation and baseless hesitation. I am sure 9 out of 10 women I will said “hello” today, the moment I walk outside, would return my greetings with exemplary politeness, and not with some scorn in their eyes.

Rhea and me were sitting for nearly half-an-hour and our teacher, the eloquent and healthy Mr. Patinio, who happens to be the head of the Central Bank here in the city, has not yet arrived and neither one of our classmates.

It’s kinda strange, I uttered to Rhea, how our classmates are not in the classroom at that very late hour especially when we had to take the final examination that night (our classes goes towards the early part of night). She answered, that perhaps they all had forgotten about the examination. Well, I said I doubt that. Study shows that 9 out of 10 students just do not forget final examinations.

Excuse me, Rhea asked, have you seen somebody walked outside? I said What? She asked, have I seen someone from the room went outside by walking in front of her and me? I said that’s impossible because as far as I have noticed, there were only two of us there in the room, me and her, how could that be possible, I asked her?

But really I said, did she really saw some person walking in front of us?

Yes, indeed she assured me to the hilt, like I thought she was lying or had gone lunatic.

I told her not to worry and asked her to describe what she saw.

She said that while we were having a conversation, she thought that a classmate had already came in and sat down and then went out again. And Rhea described what she saw. She saw a woman with long hair in a white colored gown, walked towards the door and went out.

I said to her that we do not have a classmate with that description, and that I swore that not one of our other classmates have arrived yet.

She said yes indeed, not one of our classmate looked that way. And we both agreed that it was a ghost that she saw walking in the front part of the classroom, while we were having a conversation, and waiting for Mr. Patinio and the rest of our classmates to arrive.

But we didn’t leave the room. We waited for Mr. Patinio and the rest of our classmates to arrive. And we took the final examination.

This is a poem I’ve written just today. It’s titled “Crystals In The Sky”. Obviously, it’s a surreal poem that utilizes symbols and imagery that connotes the meaning, of hope and redemption.

Once,
in every while,
my eyes is shaded by a cellophane
as the wind becomes fluid, despite of that
I stare towards the sky.

The crystals,
hiding previously from the clouds,
comes out now in the open sea, open sea of blue,
while a maiden appears acting like a mother, or like a sister
she gives me messages of hope while at times, scolding me.

Oh the lady,
that maiden with her rebuke
I’d rather see the crystals in the sky,
in their soldiery formation, unflinching and unmoved —
they must have stared at me with their entire valor.

Who are they?
What are they?
Are they friends or are they foes?
They must have had beauty for they were soothing to me,
like fresh water splashing from a mountain spring.

These crystals
they shine like diamonds in the sky,
hundreds of thousands of them, where in the past I have seen millions
or merely by the hundred thousands —
As I might have been mistaken.

The crystals in the sky,
my friends who have appeared to me,
floating in the sky and flashing before my eyes,
as they come to me,
Often.

As I was reading the news today, I was full of bewilderment at the latest incident in Texas where 400 young girls were freed yesterday by police authorities out of a polygamists compound being operated by a religious sect known as the Fundamental Church of Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Allegedly, the young girls were paired with old men in polygamous union, often by force and coercion or moral coercion, in accordance with the sect’s religious belief and practice.

It is of note that the above-mentioned sect is a breakaway cluster from the main Mormon religion formally known as the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, which had long ago negated on the practice of multiple marriages as a religious practice, where the U.S. Supreme Court had time and again decided against the practice of polygamy in America.

A landmark case on polygamy, one that is still being referred today as a leading case, is the 1879 U.S. Supreme Court decision entitled Reynolds v. United States where it was cited prominently how polygamy was (is) an “odious” conduct and ultimately contrary to “historic American values and culture”, even “from the beginning of time”, declaring farther how “marriage, while from its very nature a sacred obligation, is nevertheless, in most civilized nations, a civil contract, and usually regulated by law”

Yet, it is still an open secret in America, especially in locations within Utah and Arizona states, that polygamy have and are still being practiced and once in a while, such societal American phenomenon comes out in the open, like the Waco Incident of 1993 and now with this very recent detection of a polygamists compound in San Angelo, Texas.

Of immense interest now is the legal concept of freedom of religion, as to whether or not one’s belief and conviction allows one to practice his or her religion unabated and unhindered by any governmental restriction, as a matter of constitutional right?

Our constitution guarantees freedom of religion where the Bill of Rights, under Article III, Section 5 of the 1987 Constitution of the Philippines, states that:

“No law shall be made respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The free exervise and enjoyment of religious profession and whoship, without discrimniation or preference, shall forever be allowed. No religious test shall be requires for the exercise of civil or political rights.”

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

In the end, “freedom of religion” in our territory and in America, where our jurisdiction had mostly structured the form and content of our laws, as well as government system from, remains one constitutional right that is held with enormous weight and sanctity, just like “freedom of expression” that the law and the judiciary often bestows attention to it, resolving questions involving such question of religion and practice in the most prolific manner and in often public spectacle, for the community to relish and appreciate. (Read this very interesting case on marriage and religion - Estrada vs. Escritor.)

Yet, the point of final determination as to the question of ‘freedom of religion’ remains in the one singular rule that proclaims unambiguously how the right to belief is not tantamount to the right to practice, where in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Cantwell v. Connecticut (310 U.S. 296), applying the Belief-Conduct Distinction, it was deemed that:

“The Free Exercise Clause ‘’embraces two concepts– freedom to believe and freedom to act. The first is absolute, but in the nature of things, the second cannot be.'’ “

Similarly in our local jurisdiction, it is dogmatic that an individual has absolute freedom to believe in any form of religious belief, ‘he may even believe in the devil and worship Satan’, but once he or she puts this believe into action or outward conduct, then the State begins to interfere in the form of regulation and prohibition where in the present issue, as to whether or not freedom of religion allows one to establish highly anomalous and very scandalous polygamy compound such as the one in San Angelo, Texas where girls as young as 12 years old are compelled to enter marriages with much older men, and where there are persistent rumors of rape and physical harm.

Of course, American laws squirm at and reject polygamous union that despite that the leaders and members of the Fundamental Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints believe in such, the law does not allow them and they have in fact violated pertinent laws, criminal laws for that matter, and their ‘freedom of religion’ would in no way come in towards their protection or the justification of their conduct.

It was a major news event on BBC last night when the three remaining U.S. presidential election hopefuls attended and participated in the Senate Committee Foreign Relations hearing on the war in Iraq, centering on the progress and status of the military campaign being waged by America over there.

Senator John McCain, the Republican’s official nominee courageously contended against any form of troops withdrawal, citing extreme sectarian tensions that could boil over towards a bloody civil war if America lets go of control over Iraq. A ‘precipitous withdrawal’, as they term it nowadays, by U.S. troops would endanger not only the Iraqis but also open up hazards for America.

Both Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton of the Democratic Party maintained their call for gradual troops withdrawal despite the plea of Gen. David Petraius, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, to have a moratorium in troops withdrawal at the soonest time possible.

Senator Obama is batting for a form or level of “success” in the U.S. campaign in Iraq where troops withdrawal could be well justified but he and General Petraeus could not seem to agree on this.

Senator Clinton’s approval of the war in Iraq, when it was put for affirmation by U.S. President George W, Bush years ago, had become once ominous, thanks to Senator Obama’s rhetoric, and for that, she could possibly take a middle ground as to whether or not there should be troops reduction in the soonest possible time.

Of major note is the so-called recent “surge” in U.S. military operations where it is shown through recent data that the military campaign in Iraq had gained some progress as violence have abated somehow, as compared to last year. This is the “surge” that General Petraeus wants to sustain that he now calls for a temporary stop in troops withdrawal for the moment.

To be sure, if either of Senator Obama or Senator Clinton wins this November, he or she would be in direct confrontation with the present military officials handling Iraq where a McCain presidency would be in the opposite direction.

This now becomes a very grave concern for the U.S. electorate. A lot of Americans want the war in Iraq to end. But the generals want to pursue it to the very end, even if the end means 20 years or 50 years from now, even if everyone agrees that U.S. military resource, as well as the economic whole, is “finite” and not “infinite”. And somehow, John McCain makes sense when he says that a pullout now would throw Iraq into bloody disarray. And to complicate the matter, the Democrats may actually win the presidency.

To stay the course or not to stay the course?

This is one of the main questions that the American people have to consider in their decision as to the next president of America this coming November.

On the ballot sheet, it would be the simple question of whether to choose the Republican way or the Democratic way. But in the whole of things, the fate of the Iraq War as well as that of the Iraqi people (and global stability for that matter), becomes a very complicated question that no amount of hearings could resolve.